Innocent People Quotes
With the partition of India forming an independent Pakistan, ethnic riots broke out and millions of people were killed. This joint statement was issued to try and quell the violence but it had progressed too far. Jinnah as a political ploy to obtain the partition organized Muslims and threatened violence—see {627153} and {627169}. Things got out of hand with ethnic cleansing being an objective in many localities—see {627146} and {627149}.
This quotation is typical of the anti-Semitic view of the World that is held by many Islamic fundamentalists. Saudi Arabia promulgates this type of venom throughout the Muslim World. This, along with diatribes like it, are recorded in video and audio tape, and with the permission of the Saudi Arabian government if not with government funds.
This was in the middle of the Cold War and the political leaders had to face the fact that their major military nuclear weapons, as a practical matter, could not be used. The result was not only too destructive but retaliation would produce MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.
Bombing had reached the point where conventional bombing raids on industrial cities like Tokyo and Hamburg produced even more civilian casualties than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Tibbets’ view, through the lens of hindsight, was developed by many of the Allied servicemen who had been forced into war by expansionist and militaristic nations like Japan and Germany both of which placed much of their war material manufacturing capability in the midst of their otherwise civilian cities. Both brutally violated the laws of war and committed atrocities many times over before the allies began retaliating. There are still some who believe that it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some even feel that the mass bombing of Japanese and German cities in retaliation and in furtherance of the war effort was morally wrong. But at the time, the millions of casualties anticipated in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, persuaded virtually every American soldier and civilian that there was nothing wrong with use of the Atomic bomb, and many saw it as an absolute Godsend to prevent all the American and Japanese causalities that would have come otherwise. Many scholars remark on how it was virtually impossible to find any significant number of misgivings before or just after Hiroshima. Tibbet’s view was typical.
